Tag Archives: children

Family, Sierra Meadow

Family, Sierra Meadow
A mother and sons in a High Sierra meadow near the MInarets

Family, Sierra Meadow. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. July 4, 2006.© Copyright 2006 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A mother and sons in a High Sierra meadow near the Minarets

For some reason that I cannot quite recall, not too long ago I took an excursion through some old photographs from about a decade ago, from a time just after I had made most of the transition from film to digital photography. (This past week a friend asked if i had photographs from a 2005 trip, so I’ve been digging into this old work even more.) Back in these days I was slightly past my “wonder if digital is all that?” stage, and I was moving resolutely away from film and toward digital technologies. The results were becoming quite usable, though I was still shooting landscapes with a cropped sensor camera!

On this trip I joined up with my brother, his wife, and their three young sons. Although I had taken all of my children into the backcountry when they were young, those days were largely behind my by this point and I had almost forgotten what it is like to backpack with children. And my many solo trips back in these days had made me perhaps hyper self-reliant, to the point that I tended to let everyone fend for himself or herself. I recall being reminded of this by my brother who was bit less than pleased when I crossed a creek flooding portions of the meadow in this photograph and then kept going! Look closely and you may be able to see some of the rest of my party down in that meadow as twilight falls.


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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Children in Striped Hoodies

Children in Striped Hoodies
Two children in striped hoodies walk along a San Francisco street at night

Children in Striped Hoodies. San Francisco, California. July 25, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two children in striped hoodies walk along a San Francisco street at night

This is yet another photograph that I don’t actually recall making! Sometimes when shooting street I think I work so quickly and spontaneously that I simple capture an image and move on to the next one without imbedding the specific experience in my memory. This almost certainly was one of those very quickly made photographs, and I only made two exposures of these subjects before moving on to something else.

There is a lot in this photograph, some of which I was likely considering in the moment when I made the photograph and some of which may have been more or less a happy accident. I’m pretty certain that I was attracted to the fact that the two kids were both wearing hoodies with horizontal stripes — perhaps someone’s mother or father had just gone shopping for the two of them? A wonderful bonus was the child on the right (big sister?) putting her arm gently on the shoulder of the other child — her younger brother? Then there are the other bits of color — the blue form on the left (which houses an automated carnival-like figure) and the wildly painted lamp-post on the right. And, yes, there is something a bit disconcerting about seeing two young children alone on the nighttime streets of a big city — at least to this photographer who brought up three such young children.


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

A Moment

A Moment
A Moment

A Moment. Getty Center, Los Angeles, California. March 28, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An unplanned tableau at the Getty Center

The Getty Center, much like similar places where a lot of people collect and do interesting things, it a great place for shoot-from-the-hip photography. You keep your eyes open and keep the camera ready, and when you least expect it something worth photographing pops up, often for only a brief moment.

I don’t know if others will see it, but for me there is something intriguing and perhaps every so slightly “off” about elements of this little scene. The glowing white walls seems like something from the future. The woman against the wall seems to have one eye covered and the fellow at the far, who is only half seen, is standing and facing that bright white wall. The colors of the shirts on the two children relate in an interesting way, and one of them tilts off-kilter. There is something a bit odd about the two guys conversing at the right — something about their stances, the distance between them, and the body language.


G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.